Posted on July 21, 2015 by Glenn Gow

If you are the head of a marketing organization, you always have more tasks than time. Business is moving at a dizzying pace and urgent needs easily outstrip resources. So how do you take the most important marketing objectives of the company, prioritize them, organize a team and make sure that goals are met? Vittorio Viarengo, VP of Marketing for mobile security firm MobileIron, joins Moneyball for Marketing to show us how he uses Scrum methodology to execute tasks in two-week sprints, empower his team to say “no,” and get the important things done on time. He ought to know how to get more done in less time—he’s also VP of Products at Mobile Iron. “You need to create a reputation and a track record of shipping and getting stuff done because once you have that (you) can push back to (the) Head of Sales and say, ‘Hey, can you wait the sprint?’ and he will wait— because he knows that when I say, ‘Yes,’ it is a ‘Hell, yes’ and we’re going to get it done.” Some of the marketing tactics that Vittorio shares are as follows:

Ready, Set, Sprint!: Vittorio explains how he creates a list of major marketing objectives in executive offsite meetings every three months, creates a backlog of initiatives to be undertaken in support of those goals and then determines immediate priorities for his team to execute in two week “sprints”. He shares his “70/30” principle of prioritizing, the importance of just saying ‘no’ to requests that hurt priorities and tells us exactly how many sprints it takes to do a launch.

Measurement is Money: Vittorio shares what MobileIron did to measure the right things and reveals how refocusing marketing objectives on G-5000 accounts using Scrum methodology is delivering 10 times the value. “Measuring the right things drives the right behavior because now I can go in front of the team always with the concept of ruthless prioritization.”

Timely Tactics: Being agile must be applied throughout all the layers of a marketing organization, says Vittorio. He shares the value of consultants (and when you should never use them), explains why “perfect is death,” and reveals Mobile Iron’s thought leadership and account based marketing tactics.

Vittorio Viarengo has been running Products and Marketing at MobileIron since 2012. He started his career in Italy, building his software startup, ViVi Software. He sold it to Object Design in 1997, a then public company. Vittorio moved to the US in 1998 and held various executive management roles with BEA Systems, Oracle and VMware before joining MobileIron.

MobileIron is a mobile security company founded in 2007. They shipped the first release of their Enterprise Mobility Management platform in 2009 and since then have experienced tremendous growth that culminated in being recognized by Deloitte as the fasted growing technology company in the world (2009-2013) and then their IPO in 2014. Today they have more than 8500 customers, including more than 450 of the global 2000.